


In Loco

by Zoya1416



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Coppers, Family, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-09
Updated: 2015-04-09
Packaged: 2018-03-22 00:43:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3708859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zoya1416/pseuds/Zoya1416
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>People speculate a lot about me and DCI Nightingale.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Loco

**Author's Note:**

> This writing and its theme are original, but any particular mellifluous phrase has been nicked directly from canon. Thanks to BA for all the fun he's given us.

People speculate a lot about me and DCI Nightingale.

When they learn that I live at my nick, they're not too surprised. After all, I did before. The advantages of living there are that it's cheap and close to work.

When they find out my nick is the Folly, a five story Georgian terrace, unconverted into smaller flats, eyebrows are raised. When they find out that our nick comes with its own maid, the silent and weird Molly with disturbingly sharp teeth, well.

It's perhaps not surprising that this huge place has three libraries, an unused dining room and smoking room. It has wine cellars. It has a coach house where smelly grooms stayed, and where I was able to bring in all the necessary microprocessor powered twenty-first century items like the internet to access HOLMES directly—and bring in a plasma TV, but I maintain that's a serendipitous extra.

My favorite part of the Folly is its lower-level practice range...a MAGIC practice range where you fire actual spells at targets, and try to keep apples in the air without exploding them. It's where I try to make the Latin I've learned create the correct formae in my mind. 

Then they learn that the only person besides Molly who lives here is my guvnor, Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, a fit-looking man apparently in his early forties—he's much, much older than that, as I learned later. They look at him, not realising that his manner and dress sense were formed by the earliest years of the twentieth century, and don't see beyond the formal beautifully tailored suits, the handmade shoes.

He's a good looking man, IC1 white, brown hair, grey eyes, broad shoulders and narrow waist. He's precise in his manners—the manners he learned a century back—which seem prissy now. I'm a bloke who's known to have failed relationships with women, but that's more because I'm easily distracted or get bored and don't put as much work in as I should. 

They see him, and they see me, and they speculate aloud quite rudely that we're lovers. Older man and his slightly ethnic younger boyfriend. Difficult, because he's my guvnor.

They don't even know that the terms of my assignment to the Folly required me to swear an oath, part of which ran:

“ Do you Peter Grant of Kentish Town swear to be true to our sovereign Queen and her heirs. And well and truly serve your master for the term of your apprenticeship. And ye shall be in obedience to all the wardens and clothing of that fellowship...”

It says a lot about how much I wanted to learn magic that the part of the oath I stumbled at was the clothing part, not the calling him master part. He said I could call him Inspector though.

They're not even looking in the right direction, because if they were, they'd know that my mum had a habit of packing up my clothes and toys, including my LEGOS ™ and sending them to relatives in Sierra Leone. She told me flat out that they needed them more than I did. When I wasn't having my stuff nicked, or helping her clean houses, I was babysitting one of my many cousins. In the traditions of my family, if you could pick up a toddler on your own you were old enough to babysit while the women sat around drinking tea until they built up enough steam for their arguments. 

If they'd even once looked at my father—now there's a man who ignored his family for the lure of his addiction, and was stoned out on his heroin, not there in the house even when he was there.

With Nightingale, it's something more demanding and warmer at the same time. Me and Nightingale aren't dating. He's my line manager and I don't fancy him. I respect and obey his directions, except for the times when I build variations on spells he says I haven't learned well enough yet. Except for the times when I'm trying to quantify the bloody magic—we have no units of measurement available in the twenty-first century—and he says I'm messing about too much.

But—here's some Latin: in loco parentis. “He stands in the place of a parent.” Not legally. But morally; justly. I know without his saying anything that his shield is over me, as it was for the doomed soldiers at Ettersberg. It's his job to protect me from danger, as much as he can. It's my job to learn enough magic so we can face down dangers together.


End file.
